Mac Pro bucket design includes AMD Fire Pro

The Church of Apple has announced yet another product that made the heart of their faithful followers tick faster. The new Mac Pro has changed its shape for the first time in many years and it doesn’t look very desktopy anymore.

The new Mac Pro has just been showcased but it will ship later this fall. It has an oval shape, but despite its much smaller size than its predecessor packs a lot of muscle power inside. The usual suspects such as Xeon up to 12 cores with E5 chipset, PCIe gen 3 and memory that gets twice faster than before the AMD is the clear winner with its graphics.

Graphics cards are on one side of the cylinder, motherboard with CPU and RAM is on the other, while PCIe based storage with 1250MB/S is on the third side. From I/O ports you can find the new Thunderbolt 2 a few USB 3.0, four total, Gigabit Ethernet, and HDMI 1.4 and a nice glowing power button.

These three sides of the motherboard have unified thermal core and a single fan that sits on top of the system is responsible to keep things cool. Not a bad idea at all.

Let's get back to graphics subsystem for a second. Despite the fact that world + dog knows that Nvidia is still the dominant force in professional graphics, Apple went for AMD’s FirePRO dual graphics cards that can get it to 7 teraflops of performance and mandatory 4K resolution support. These two graphics card combined have up to 6GB video memory and will do fine for some rendering, video editing and photo shopping models around the world.

We are surprised that Nvidia didn’t find its place here, but this has to be related to a better deal with AMD as despite the price difference Mac Pro lovers would be willing to pay extra. They have been overpaying their handsome desktops for years and a choice of graphics that comes at extra cost would be more logical.

The cylinder share feature looks nice and the 365 computing looks cute and will help Apple justify its overpricing over some uglier but as powerful workstations around the world. That is what Apple is great at, making pretty things that people want. Or as Phil Schiller put it: "can't innovate more my ass."